Buffer

How Buffer Increased Their Revenue by $25,500 in 30 days by Using Kissmetrics

Buffer automatically share articles, pictures, and videos throughout the day on one or all your social media accounts.

Industry: Social Media App

Business Model: Freemium SaaS (Software as a Service)

Headquarters: Hong Kong & San Francisco, CA

Previous/Alternative Analytics Solution: Internal analytics

Kissmetrics customer since: March 2012

The Problem

Buffer is one of the largest social media management platforms with over 300,000 customers. Given the volume of customers, they were having an issue analyzing all of their individual customers and identifying actionable metrics. In addition to that, the company couldn't figure out what experiments to run in order to help increase the lifetime value of their customers, reduce churn, improve conversion rates, and increase average selling price.

Buffer turned to Kissmetrics to solve these problems through the use of our person-based customer analytics service.

The Solution

Through the use of Kissmetrics, Buffer was not only able to find the areas in their signup flows that were reducing conversions, but they were also able to get actionable insights on how they could reduce their churn and increase their lifetime value per customer.

The Results

Kissmetrics gave us actionable insights that helped us improve the life-time-value of our customers. This resulted in a $25,500 increase in revenue.
— Leo Widrich, Co-founder of Buffer

Kissmetrics can help you increase customer retention rates.

The Strategy

To help Buffer improve their conversion rates, we first tracked their drop off rates through our funnel report. And to help reduce the churn and improve lifetime value per customer we used a number of reports to determine engagement patterns to help increase the events of actions that cause users to upgrade their Buffer account.

Technique #1: Improve conversion rates

Through Kissmetrics Buffer was able to track all of the paths users took before they purchased. They used this data to determine which pages people were most likely to drop off on and they ran a/b tests to help minimize it and increase the conversions.

Buffer quickly learned that with Google Analytics you can only track front-end conversions. But because they are a freemium based SaaS company, they wanted to track their backend funnel. Kissmetrics was able to do this for Buffer, which allowed them to have visibility on how they can improve their free to paid conversions.

Technique #2: Reduce churn

With Kissmetrics Revenue report Buffer was able to see and track the life-time value of their customers. This data showed them that a quick way to reduce their churn and improve their lifetime value was to offer customers a yearly plan. Although customers get a discount from their yearly plan, this helped reduce churn and keep customers around longer.

Through the cohort report Buffer was able to test how different product variations affected churn. This data helped the optimize the user experience through features and messaging so that customers become addicted to their SaaS application, which decreased the number of people that cancelled their subscription.

Technique #3: Segment users into buckets

With the Power Report Kissmetrics provides, Buffer learned about all of their customer types. Different customers are using Buffer for different reasons. Through the Power Report they were able to segment their user base so they can provide different email marketing messages to each group, which helped boost their overall conversions.

The segmentation also helped Buffer identify which customers where most likely to churn before they actually churned. This was then used to create specific marketing campaigns for that segment, which help re-engage those users with Buffer and increase their overall revenue.

If you stare at Google Analytics and Omniture reports and are unsure of what to do next, give Kissmetrics a try. Unlike the other two solutions, Kissmetrics clearly tells you what you need to do to boost your revenue.— Leo Widrich, Co-founder of Buffer

Make smarter business decisions with Kissmetrics Customer Analytics.

Conclusion

If you are a SaaS or subscription based company you know how difficult it may be to drive more customers to your website. For this reason you shouldn't just optimize the front end of your website, but you should also optimize your backend to reduce your churn and improve your lifetime value.

Consider trying these 3 Kissmetrics reports in order to maximize your revenue:

Power report — this report easily allows you to segment your user base so you can create different marketing messages for different groups. The end result will be reducing churn and increased revenue.

Cohort report — adding features and changing your messaging may seem like it is working out in the short run, but unless you are using a cohort report you won't be able to see how much of a positive or negative impact these changes will have on your revenue in the long run.

Revenue report — if you want to fine-tune your marketing you need to understand how much each of your customers are worth. Just because someone signs up to your website from Google and another signs up from Yahoo, it doesn't mean they are worth the same. One of those traffic sources may provide a customer that pays twice as long as the other. Kissmetrics will show your lifetime value of your customers and show you which marketing channels bring the most valuable customers.

Not yet convinced? We’re here to help you!

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